John Clarkson
My early developmental experience included growing up on a farm in the Waikato. Although I enjoyed helping to care for the calves, lambs, piglets, chickens, puppies, and kittens, I never wanted to become a farmer. Animal handling practices at the time were not always baby-friendly, and some were cruel. It is reassuring that the practice has improved to some extent.
Instead of farming I was able to follow my older brother’s footsteps to New Zealand’s then only medical school at Otago. Despite the distance and the hazards of hitchhiking as the main form of travel, it was usual to return to the home farm during term holidays. Here I was able to be involved with the observations made by my paediatrician brother-in-law, Ross Howie, on the respiratory distress syndrome experienced by pre-term lambs in the makeshift “intensive care unit” in our woolshed. Along with Obstetrician Mont Liggins, also from Auckland, who discovered the maturing effect of maternally-given antenatal steroids on fetal lamb lungs, he went on to conduct the first randomised control trial of this intervention in humans. This practice which is now standard worldwide has saved many thousands of lives. While I was a medical student it was inspiring to be on the periphery of this ground-breaking research.
Off Prozac after a bit over a year, for a time there were colours and movement. But not the ease that I assumed came to other people. I still felt out of step, uneasy in the world. Looking at life through glass, trapped outside on an exposed ledge. And then over time – months or perhaps years – there was the fog and the rattle of chains and the familiar cell. Looking back, I realise that twenty-five years have passed, twenty-five years where I have made my way in and out of fog, with some years encapsulated in green and white pills, and some years marked by the awareness that the fog might roll in, and underneath all, was that the rattle of chains…. (depression is a hydra demanding over-writing and mixed metaphors, while eluding all). Even with the pills, the chains are still there, I am just more aware I am carrying them and that some of the weight is shared with modern medicine. Depression is a kind of knowing – there is no unknowing.
In New Zealand, a total of 36,684 referrals were made for people needing mental health crisis assessment during the 2015-16 financial year. Nearly 13,000 referrals were made for people needing an overnight stay – some patients being referred multiple times.
Only in silence the word,